Preparing Engineering Students for the Fall Semester through a Summer Math Bridge Program

Abstract This is an abstract for a full paper. First-Year Engineering Program (FEP) was established in 2007 with the intent of increasing student retention and success in College of Engineering (CoE). One of the main hindrances to retention at a public university engineering program with open enrollment is the unpreparedness of students for rigorous curriculum requirements of the first year, especially for the progression in Calculus courses. Approximately 40% of CoE students begin in Calculus I while 30% begin ahead (in Calculus II or higher), 20% of CoE students begin in Precalculus (one math class behind), and 10% of CoE students begin in College Algebra (two math classes behind). In order to improve the math-readiness for a group of first year engineering students who had ACT scores below 28 (thus, did not qualify for Calculus I), CoE and FEP offered Engineering Math Acceleration Program (EMAP) in Summer 2019. EMAP was a one week bridge program with the objectives to help students improve their math preparedness, to connect students to the university life, to allow students to explore the College's opportunities and resources, and to help students make connections with their peers to form friendships early that could help them during their fall semester. We used ALEKS Placement, Preparation, and Learning Assessment (commonly noted as ALEKS, ALEKS Placement test, or Math placement test), an adaptive assessment tool, to help with instructions. ALEKS has been recently adopted by the mathematics department at the university; therefore, students who scored into a higher math bracket at the end of EMAP had the opportunity to move up in their math placement for their first fall semester. The program was sponsored by College of Engineering and was offered free to students. Students were also offered a scholarship at the end of the program if they fully participated in the program. While most students did not improve enough on the second ALEKS test to advance their math placement for the fall semester, the experience of being on campus and using math software that is similar to that used in math courses taught on campus did prove beneficial to this group of students. In this paper, we give the details of the accelerated math program and we track the performance this group of students after they finished the EMAP program. We will compare retention rates of this population of students to the FEP cohort as well as to students in each math placement that did not participate in EMAP. We will also compare math success rates of EMAP students to that of students who did not participate in EMAP for each math placement.